Jesse James Garrett gave the closing plenary at IA Summit 2009, and he asked a question of the audience, name some great designers.
And the audience shouted out names.
Then he asked, name the works of design they are considered great for.
And the audience was silent.
...
Don't look for names. Look for works, and then find out who made them.
If you don't know what's considered good work, don't ask like you asked this question. "Good" is subjective, and design is not art; design has a purpose, is backed by research, has metrics, supports a business model. Rather, you want to study work that solves the problem the designer intended. Maybe they intended to make it easy to book an airline ticket, or maybe they intended to appease ten different executive vice presidents. Pick any work, and learn why it was made that way, and determine if it's great or not (or, more likely, if there are aspects which are great for a particular use case). You could do in-depth interviews, you could do contextual inquiry, you could ask the designer, you could usability test it, you could go through heuristics, you could do GOMS, there are any number of methods.
I'm not sure how true that is. There are principles of design, across fields, within fields, and in specific use cases, and you can judge based on the principles how good a design is. "Good" may be hard to define in general and in each context, but it's not as subjective as people think it is.
The Metro design philosophy is the defunct Zune team's true legacy. Their work on the PMP went to waste mostly due to timing, but their design work has lived on in everything else Microsoft has done since. Virtually all the core tenants of Windows Phone and Windows 8's design, from typography as hierarchy to live tiles and colorful flat design, were first seen in the Zune desktop software and Zune HD's UI.
I wouldn't consider Metro game changing. The design and principles behind it was floating around in Houston long before I saw it appear on Windows devices and the Xbox console.
Microsoft made it popular but it's been around for a while in response to design driven web designer vs info and interface driven design.
And the audience shouted out names.
Then he asked, name the works of design they are considered great for.
And the audience was silent.
...
Don't look for names. Look for works, and then find out who made them.
If you don't know what's considered good work, don't ask like you asked this question. "Good" is subjective, and design is not art; design has a purpose, is backed by research, has metrics, supports a business model. Rather, you want to study work that solves the problem the designer intended. Maybe they intended to make it easy to book an airline ticket, or maybe they intended to appease ten different executive vice presidents. Pick any work, and learn why it was made that way, and determine if it's great or not (or, more likely, if there are aspects which are great for a particular use case). You could do in-depth interviews, you could do contextual inquiry, you could ask the designer, you could usability test it, you could go through heuristics, you could do GOMS, there are any number of methods.
But don't look for names first.